Hong Kong: As China Clamps Down, the West Does Nothing

While it’s tempting to compare the present suppression of Hong Kong’s freedoms by Chinese Communists to the Soviet crushing of Hungary in 1956 or the Prague Spring of 1968, the situation probably has more in common with the events of 1947.

At the start of that year, Hungary was still nominally a republic, though Soviet troops had never left the country. After a string of dismal electoral showings — two years earlier, the Communists had only mustered 17 percent of the national vote — the Soviet Union was fed up with the vagaries of democracy. When the Western powers negotiated a peace treaty with Hungary, the Russians installed a puppet government, and that was that. The Allies viewed Hungary as a nation within the Soviet sphere; the United States wasn’t going to go to war over such a small country — not in 1947, not in 1956, never. Nor were we going to spark a world war with the Soviets over Czechoslovakia, which would meet the same fate as Hungary in 1948. So the Iron Curtain went up, and it stayed up for nearly 45 years.

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David Harsanyi

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner.

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While it’s tempting to compare the present suppression of Hong Kong’s freedoms by Chinese Communists to the Soviet crushing of Hungary in 1956 or the Prague Spring of 1968, the situation probably has more in common with the events of 1947.

At the start of that year, Hungary was still nominally a republic, though Soviet troops had never left the country. After a string of dismal electoral showings — two years earlier, the Communists had only mustered 17 percent of the national vote — the Soviet Union was fed up with the vagaries of democracy. When the Western powers negotiated a peace treaty with Hungary, the Russians installed a puppet government, and that was that. The Allies viewed Hungary as a nation within the Soviet sphere; the United States wasn’t going to go to war over such a small country — not in 1947, not in 1956, never. Nor were we going to spark a world war with the Soviets over Czechoslovakia, which would meet the same fate as Hungary in 1948. So the Iron Curtain went up, and it stayed up for nearly 45 years.